Seventh
US Circuit Court Chief Judge Richard A. Posner—one of the most brilliant,
and outspoken, conservative judges on the federal bench—has made it
clear in his writings that the opinions of foreign judges are not authoritative
and have no place in American jurisprudence. They set no binding precedent
that obligates a US judge to use their arguments in shaping their decision.
Posner admitted, however, that the thinking behind the legal opinions
of foreign judges may offer a storehouse of knowledge could be relevant
in the decision process of the judiciary. But the view of the Chief
Judge is that "...[t]o cite foreign law as authority is to flirt
with the discredited idea of a universal natural law, or to suppose
fantastically that the world's judges constitute a single, elite community
of wisdom and conscience."

It
is likewise the view of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia that the high
court has no authority to consider foreign law as a "guide" in rendering
decisions in cases which do not deal with international issues or with
international litigants. Ginsburg, of course, disagrees. "Judges
in the United States," Ginsburg noted in her address to the Constitutional
Court of South Africa, "are free to consult all manner of commentary—restatements,
treaties, what law professors or even law students write copiously in
law reviews. For example, if we can count those writings, why not the
analysis of a question similar to the one we confront contained in an
opinion of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Constitutional Court of
South Africa, the German Constitutional Court, or the European Court
of Human Rights?...The notion that it is improper to look beyond the
borders of the United States in grappling with hard questions...is in
line with the view of the US Constitution as a document essentially
frozen in time as of the date of its ratification."

Ginsburg
noted that's the reason that the Supreme Court is now casting comparative
sideglances at the opinions of humankind. When the court was weighing
Roper v Simmons in March, 2005, it looked at the propriety and
utility of the whole spectrum of international law to gain a fresh assessment
of the evolving standards of decency.

Roper
v Simmons was heard on Oct. 13, 2004. In a 5-to-4, Mar. 1, 2005
decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the 8th and 14th Amendments
forbid the execution of offenders who were under the age of 18 when
their crimes were committed. That's not true. The courts of Europe determined
that society can't execute offenders under the age of 18. The 8th Amendment
merely says the courts can't impose cruel or unusual punishment. The
14th Amendment applies the restrictions of the Bill of Rights to the
States when, originally, they applied only to the federal government.
While anti-death penalty advocates believe the death sentence is a cruel
punishment because it takes the life of those it is imposed upon. However,
the principle of an eye-for-an-eye is Biblical, and death is the only
sentence that should be imposed upon those who, with malice, take the
life of another.

Justice
Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Roper v Simmons. In writing
the opinion, Kennedy noted that "...the opinion of the world community
provides respected and significant confirmation of our own conclusions.
It does not lessen our fidelity to the Constitution." Although Kennedy
sits on a bench where everything he says—if he's part of the majority—is
right (since he is writing law when he speaks), in this case he was
wrong. Kennedy, Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter, and Stevens wrote the majority
opinion in Roper. In Roper, Kennedy—who actually wrote the opinion—stated
that the view of the world community provides "...respected and significant
confirmation of our own conclusions. Kennedy said "The overwhelming
weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty...does
not lessen our fidelity to the Constitution...[or recognize] the express
affirmation of certain fundamental rights by other nations and peoples."
In Roper, the high court accepted amicus briefs from former President
Jimmy Carter, who urged the high court to "...consider the opinion
of the international community, which has rejected the death penalty
for child offenders worldwide." In addition, amicus briefs were
filed by South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and South Africa's former
president, Willem de Klerk. Ginsburg, like her liberal peers on the
high court, believe the Supreme Court will accept the opinions of humankind
as a matter of comity because as the world gets smaller and our enemies
closer, she is convinced that all nations will be forced to trust all
other nations—and cooperate with them to make all nations safe by the
same accord.

That
accord is not being written by a judicial consensus based on the rule
of law in the United States, but by the utopian rules of quixotic men
whose views were shaped and supported by the chimeric foundations of
wealthy industrialists and bankers who have been carefully tailoring
world government—to be controlled by them—one layer at a time, since
1905. One of the tasks of the global nation builders has been to structure
the plenary rules by which all men in all nations shall accord themselves
or be judged by the International Court of Justice—the World
Court—in the Hague. At the heart of the effort to create uniform laws
throughout the world is an organization called the International
Law Institute [ILI], created in 1955 at the Georgetown University
Law Center. A sister center, the Insitut Auslandisches und Internationales
Wirtschaftscrecht was founded in Frankfurt, Germany at the Johannes
Goethe University. The purpose of the Institute was to create a uniform
legal system between Europe and America in order to facilitate transnational
business and trade and to create a single global economic community
out of the world. Stemming from the ILI is the International Judicial
Academy whose job it would be to train judges to use domesticated
international law in formulating their judicial decisions.

The
ILI's first Director, Professor Heinrich Kronstein, fled Germany in
the 1930s when Hitler assumed power. In the 1970s, Professor Don Wallace,
Jr., a Georgetown law professor assumed the reins of the ILI, expanding
its focus to include professional training in the legal, economic and
financial problems of developing countries. In the 1990s, the role of
the Institute were expanded again to include the problems facing the
new nations that were part of the Soviet Union as they transitioned
from socialism to free market economies, and from totalitarianism to
the rule of law. While the ILI is headquartered in Washington, DC, there
are regional centers in Kampala, Uganda; Abuja, Nigeria; Cairo, Egypt;
Santiago, Chile and Hong Kong, SAR. Within this decade, the ILI expects
to have offices located in Moscow, Russia; Beijing, China; Pyongyang,
North Korea; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Tehran, Iran.

The
ILI now advises governments—including China—and multilateral NGOs on
societal problems, the revision of regulations, legislation drafting,
contract law and criminal law standardization, the standardization of
banking regulations, and hundreds of other transnational projects that
have gone literally unnoticed for a half century by the common, working
class people of the world whose governments were working behind their
backs to dissolve sovereignty and create a stateless community of nations
governed by the UN not in New York, but at the Hague.

At
the heart of the ILI are training programs and seminars for participants
from the public and private sectors. The topics range from international
business, investment, governance and law. The ILI's mission is to raise
the levels of professional competence and capacity in every nation and,
by creating uniform standards of law, establishing a level playing field
in the international arena. Centermost is the training of judges, lawyers,
government officials, bankers, industrialists, business managers and
other interested parties that, in the fast-moving global economy of
the 21st century, those who are going to succeed—nations, corporations
or individuals—must grasp the changing patterns of international commerce,
banking, communications, and all facets of governance, adapt and master
the skills needed to thrive in the global economy.

To
begin preparing the world for the global community, the Inter-American
Development Bank [IDB] (which is owned by 47-UN member nations)
and the Washington College of Law hosted its first seminar on
incorporating international law into domestic courts from Nov. 10-14,
1997. The seminar was attended by 45 judges, prosecutors and public
defenders from 18 different Latin American countries. The aim of the
project was to familiarize the attendees with the precepts of international
law and inter-American human rights. The primary training goals of the
IDB/WCL is judicial reform.

While
the judicial courses are designed for judges at every judicial level,
the project planners specifically target federal judges at the appellate
level for several reasons. They affect judicial "policy" and the nature
of law on a daily basis. Their decisions influence the rulings of judges
at all lower levels. At that time—in 1997, a decision was made not to
target Supreme Court justices since the high courts generally hear only
a small number of cases per year. That philosophy has now changed, and
beginning in 1999, all of the US Supreme Court Justices except Rehnquist,
Scalia and Thomas attended at least one seminar on incorporating international
law into domestic courts.

The
project planners of Utopia initially targeted judges at the appellate
level believing they have the strongest influence over the lower courts,
and in the belief that the justices in the nation's highest court would
be immune from tampering. However, in 2004 the US Supreme Court delivered
decisions in four cases dealing with International law: Republic
of Austria v Altmann; Rumsfeld v Padilla; Rasul v Bush; Hamdi v Rumsfeld;
and Sosa v Alverez-Machain. The issues of international law that
were specifically examined in those cases were: [1] the reach of the
Alien Tort Claims Act, [2] the retroactively of the Foreign Sovereign
Immunities Act, [3] the jurisdiction of US courts in the detention of
foreign nationals, and [4] the rights of detainees to challenge their
classification as enemy combatants. As the Rehnquist Court was obligated
to deal with these international issues, some members of the high court
began grappling with an even larger issue—at what point, and to what
extent, should international law influence domestic law. That is the
same issue being debated at the ILI. The answer—from the liberal perspective—is
that, international law should affect every court, at every level, as
quickly as possible.

That's
why, in 2005, the International Judiciary Academy of Washington,
DC, began holding educational seminars and lectures for 20 State-level
trial and appellate judges. Not only will lower courts begin to incorporate
international legal opinions in their decisions, the Utopians want to
make sure there is an adequate pool of "qualified and approved" candidates
for the federal bench—particularly, nominees for the appellate level
courts.

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Like
the institutionalized deadwood that occupies the seats of both Houses
of Congress because they've been in Washington, DC too long, federal
judges are theoretically institutionalized from the moment they are
confirmed to the bench because they have been given a lifetime berth
and are answerable to no one. We can remove any politician—even the
most powerful—in the voting booth, but we can't vote federal judges
off the bench. However, we can impeach them. It's time to sent a message
to the federal court system. Boot Ruth.For
part 1 click below.

Jon Christian Ryter is the pseudonym of a former
newspaper reporter with the Parkersburg, WV Sentinel. He authored a
syndicated newspaper column, Answers From The Bible, from the mid-1970s
until 1985. Answers From The Bible was read weekly in many suburban
markets in the United States.

Today, Jon is an advertising
executive with the Washington Times. His website, www.jonchristianryter.com
has helped him establish a network of mid-to senior-level Washington
insiders who now provide him with a steady stream of material for use
both in his books and in the investigative reports that are found on
his website.

Not only will lower courts begin to incorporate international legal opinions
in their decisions, the Utopians want to make sure there is an adequate
pool of "qualified and approved" candidates for the federal bench— particularly,
nominees for the appellate level courts.